Optimizing Your Social Media Accounts

Optimizing your social media uses many of the same principles that optimizing a website does. You need to know what keywords your are trying to rank for and then set up your social media accounts to optimize for those terms.

The goal for optimizing any of your web properties is to let the power of computers work to help people find you. For websites and blogs, you are optimizing the content so that search engines like Google can find you. For social media optimization, you want to make sure that people can find you when they are searching on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For me the major benefit of successfully optimizing my social media is that I now PULL people to ask to be my friend, fan or connection, rather than having to go out and find people myself!

Where To Start Optimizing Your Social Media

In this article I will address each of the big three (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) with the ways that you can make your accounts easier to find and index.

Facebook Optimization

Facebook Email – if you generally use one email for your “real” mail and another email for spam, make sure to use your real email for Facebook. Email searches is one of the ways that people can find you on Facebook.

In your profile fill out all the different areas (I skip Religion, Politics and Relationships) but make sure to add current city, hometown, intrests and books my clients like. These are clues that will help people find you.

You can do Notes on both your FB profile and business pages. These notes are indexable by Google so make sure to make in text hyperlinks to your website or blog. Visit How To Make A Hyperlink if you need help!

On your Facebook Business Page make sure to name it something real. Having a “fun” name is fine but having something related to your brand or industry will make you easier to search out when people are looking for a company like yours.

A custom Facebook business page is the best way I have found yet to pass love onto Google from FB. They are VERY affordable and if you use actual words and pictures (rather than one big pretty image) you could get another ranking on page one from Google for a key search phrase.

LinkedIn Optimization

On LinkedIn they helpfully allow you to add your “website” and “blog”. If you select “other” instead you can use keywords to link to your website or blog from LinkedIn instead.

Your current occupation is SUPER important. Instead of listing yourself as one umbrella title, make sure you list each of your job functions as a separate job. For example I should have Small Business Marketing Owner, Marketing Speaker and Social Media Marketing Expert.

Make sure to fill out your old jobs and put the specializations you have. A friend recently called and said her husband got a plum consultation gig because he had something like “deciduous clay” in his past jobs and they needed someone with that knowledge!

Again use your “real” email so people can find you easily! The pain of sorting through some junk is SO worth the pleasure of having people come to you!

Twitter Optimization

Make sure to put in your location – NO you cannot put two locations at once like Denver Boulder since that is not really a place. Make sure to put your city and state, just like it is on mail you get – i.e. Clearwater, FL.

Put a link to your website, I get some really great traffic from people checking out my Twitter profile.

Fill out your bio, making sure to put all kinds keyword rich, searchable terms. There are people out there looking to add your industry, hobbies and other fun facts to their twitter follow-ees. This is another great way to PULL people to you rather than having to find them one by one.

Comments

Tara – you touched on how to optimize the Big 3 social networks and I agree with your techniques. I recently came across a Firefox plug-in you might check out. Its called Rapportive. It automatically shows the social media footprint of the person who sent you an email right within gmail. I like this or a couple of reasons; 1) its nice to SEE what the person looks like (if you’ve not met them yet) 2) it shows their Klous score/ranking (I’m only a 46 so far) 3) it shows (using a chiclet) which social networks the person has a profile, so you can a) connect with them b) review their profile on that network. I’ve been using Rapportive for a couple of weeks and find it very handy. If you use Firefox and get it, let me know what you think eh? — Neil